Jos Buttler, the latest candidate to be England's Chosen One

The Somerset batsman, like Ben Hollioake and Andrew Flintoff before him, will be expected to provide some transformative gunpowder to the one-day side

In Jos Buttler, English cricket is blessed with a player of unusual talent, who has impressed most spectacularly with the cleanness of his hitting from a standing start in Twenty20 and 50-over cricket. Photograph: Hamish Blair/Getty Images

Wednesday 8 February 2012 04.00 EST
First published on Wednesday 8 February 2012 04.00 EST

Look out: here comes everyone! The announcement of England's one-day international and Twenty20 squads for the second phase of their Gulf state winter brought with it the usual double-decker busload of eager insurgents. If England's 50-over form overseas remains stagnant, there is at least a sense of spring-like fecundity when it comes to player turnover. The losing Test team of the 1990s tended to rotate selection among a band of jaded but familiar faces. By contrast the current one-day set-up likes to sate itself on fresher meat, helped in recent times by the mini-generation of bold and talented younger players given oxygen by the domestic Twenty20 competition.

In fact selection seems increasingly geared towards a particular breed of tyro batsman: cold-eyed, youthfully severe and uncluttered by Old Thinking. For England's one-day team this is the prophecy of The Chosen One who will bring balance to the force – or at least provide some transformative gunpowder, effect an attitude makeover and deliver an injection of the assertiveness so obviously lacking during last year's travails on the subcontinent. These days pretty much every England selection contains The Chosen One, or the latest candidate for the role. This time is no exception. Welcome to international cricket, Jos Buttler.

It isn't an easy task being The Chosen One, even for a player as vibrantly talented as Buttler appears to be. There is a basic problem with entering a losing team bowed by such complex expectation. England have never really been able to respond to the more fluid demands of Powerplay cricket, or the occasional fashion for pinch-hitting that preceded it. And it is in this area that new players are usually required to perform. This is different from the Test team, where for most of the last decade new players have simply been required to slot into a machine that already works. In the one-day team new players often come with an expectation they will change the way the team plays, affecting not just results but also tempo and tactics. Come and fix us, untried 21-year-old batsman, the call seems to be. Make us better, make us modern.

Ben Hollioake was perhaps the forerunner of these transformative young guns. Hollioake's debut innings, a languid smiting of Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath at Lord's, fitted the narrative perfectly. Here was uncluttered, Aussie-accented youth. The revolution had arrived. And happily it didn't actually require much work, but would come from the bottom, percolating up into the cobwebbed reaches of a stagnant middle order, clearing out the cupboards, toppling the chairman of selectors and so on.

As a batsman Andrew Flintoff later succeeded for a while in the role of Chosen One, particularly while he was still trusted in the top five. Others have come and gone. Recently Eoin Morgan has proved an outsourced success in the role, not so much the Chosen One as the chosen one. Jonny Bairstow hinted at an invigorating fearlessness on his debut. And Ben Stokes was exposed by wily Indian spin bowling as merely a very talented developing player with a big future rather than a ready-made answer to a generation of struggle.

At least in Buttler English cricket is blessed with a player of unusual talent, who has impressed most spectacularly with the cleanness of his hitting from a standing start in Twenty20 and 50-over cricket. A match-winning 72 against Gloucestershire last season stood out for its savage, but apparently effortless, hitting over midwicket and straight down the ground. Happily, Buttler also has an acquisitive side to his batting. "Jos is very comfortable with his game in one-day cricket, he knows how to work the ball around, where he wants to score, how to rotate the strike," his county coach, Andy Hurry, has said. Most of all, though, he has shown a coolness under pressure, as evidenced most recently by a pair of contrasting centuries against Sri Lanka A, one explosive, the other measured.

Where Buttler's one-day record is outstanding – in 39 matches he averages 70.57 (aided by not outs) with a strike rate of 128.2 – his first-class record is merely promising. Albeit, to dwell on this would be Old Thinking, even perhaps a little anti-Chosen One. This is a player of the new world, a man who made his Twenty20 debut against New South Wales in Hyderabad, accurately reflecting the kind of culture-shock cricket Buttler is expected to excel at over the next decade. Also playing that day was David Warner, Australia's own Chosen One, and Warner is perhaps the template for the Buttler generation: Chosen One royalty capable of reaching up out of the soup of itinerant global Twenty20-dom to take his first steps in Test cricket.

Like Warner, Buttler offers explosive gifts rather than a CV of box-ticking completeness. And along with Bairstow and the fast-scoring Alex Hales he is charged with introducing not just a sense of talent in the wings, but of a more progressive, inventive talent than that which came before. It is a daunting twin-task on the slow Emirati pitches that have to date becalmed more experienced players. Implosion or explosion, it should make for a fascinating spectacle.